Brayne Miste

The pendulum clock—perhaps the most awful device of all time—was invented in 1656. The culprit, a Dutch bloke called Christian Huygens, obtained notoriety the year before by suggesting that a ring surrounded Saturn. Galileo Galilei had already observed what looked like the planet’s “handles” way back in 1610, but he misinterpreted this sight as two flanking moons. Huygens, with the aid of much greater telescopic magnification, first discerned the true nature of the rings.1

It was an even earlier Galilean precedent that led to Huygens’ heinous pendulum clock. By most accounts, Galileo was a lifelong Roman Catholic, despite his kerfuffle with the Vatican. When he was 16 years old, he was set on becoming a monk—but his appalled dad, a struggling lutenist, pushed him to study medicine instead (classic). But even for pious folk, mass can test one’s attention—and Galileo attended Pisa Cathedral, where beauty abounds to capture an idle gaze:

You could stare at that ceiling for hours!

During a service there in 1581, amid soporific hymns, teenage Galileo became intensely absorbed in the oscillations of an oil lamp suspended from the nave. There was something about the movement. Each swing of the incense-laden air seemed to take roughly the same duration, no matter how far out the lamp had been buffeted by the draughts. Could that be so? Could an inorganic apparatus be so regular? And how could he tell?

Ecco! Inspiration struck. Galileo lifted his sleeve, fumbled for his pulse, and waited for a swing to begin: one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three. Another swing, another three beats—maybe. It was difficult to tell, because his heart was beating fast in excitement now. The sermon went unheard. After the service, Galileo ran home to tinker with strings and weights, confirming his intuition and creating a crude yet elegant device to measure the rate and variation of a patient’s pulse. His impressed professors took his idea, boosting the medical faculty’s cred.

The underlying principle gestated in Galileo’s mind. Two decades later, he conducted a series of experiments on pendulums that demonstrated that the period of their swings was independent of the width of their arc. This property (isochronism) meant that successive, smaller swings maintained their duration even as momentum dissipated,2 making pendulums useful for rudimentary timekeeping. Galileo put them to use measuring both astrological events and the acceleration of falling objects.

To our detriment, Galileo used his spare time under house arrest in the 1630s to conceive a further innovation: an escapement mechanism driven by a pendulum. Each swing released a tooth in a gear, allowing the gear train to “escape” by a fixed amount—for example, to shift a clock’s hands. The gear simultaneously pushed the pendulum staff, replacing energy lost to friction.3

God, alarmed by this development, struck Galileo blind to warn us that we were about to irreversibly erode our relationship to the world. Undaunted, in 1641, Galileo described the mechanism to his son, Vincenzo, who began construction. In a panicked pair of last-minute divine interventions, Galileo died in 1642, and Vincenzo followed in 1649 before he could complete the prototype. All was well on Earth…

…for a scant seven years, before the dastardly and brilliant Huygens took up the slack and successfully realised that most evil of inventions: the pendulum clock, a devastating improvement in horology. Water clocks had existed for millennia, sure, and all-mechanical clock escapements based on balance wheels emerged in the 13th century, but even the best designs available to Huygens lost 15 minutes per day—and in an unpredictable fashion. By contrast, the first pendulum clocks lost only 15 seconds per day.

Time could now be measured with unprecedented precision. The design spread rapidly, and facilitated the Industrial Revolution a century later: division of labour was required to meet the burgeoning demand for sophisticated standing clocks with their fine innards, decorative faces, and ornate enclosures; this emphasis on specialisation provided a pool of British industrial expertise useful for further advances in manufacturing; accurate timekeeping enabled freight and factory coordination; and, most notably, workers could be corralled and paid by partitions on the dial.4

By the end of the 19th century, pocket watches were ubiquitous. With a timepiece in our breast pockets, above the source of the pulse Galileo used to commit his original sin, the soft ticking of seconds slipped into our bloodstream. Life shifted from a cyclical, agrarian temporality to a finite, linear experience. Work and leisure, meals and rest; all these activities diverged from biological schedules, and we became dissociated from the sun and the somatic.

Can we ever again become unaware of time’s passage? It’s all too easy to lament how quickly the weeks pass us by. The minutes turn to sand that slips through our fingers… but time isn’t a resource we can clench our hands and control, no matter how much we colour-code our calendars. That the pendulum clock was born in a cathedral seems fitting, as mortality fuels the religious impulse, and the scourge of time has us attend like little else to the brevity of our lives, like a sacramental wafer disintegrating on the tongue.

1. Not to undersell Huygens’ genius: it took years of observation to finalise his theory, and another decade of lens improvement before all his skeptics were convinced. These days, astronomers submit preprints to stake their claim of priority to discoveries before their results are published. Delightfully, in the 17th century, they shared anagrams. Huygens sketched his take on Saturn with a a a a a a a c c c c c d e e e e e h i i i i i i i l l l l m m n n n n n n n n n o o o o p p q r r s t t t t t u u u u for Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohaerente, ad eclipticam inclinato (“It is surrounded by a thin flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic”). An advantage to this commitment scheme over digital repositories is that astronomers could avoid embarrassment if they realised there had been a mistake: they’d simply neglect to reveal the anagram solution. ⤴
2. Huygens would later show that technically only small pendulum swings (around 4–6°) are isochronous. ⤴
3. Here’s an animation that makes this a lot easier to visualise. ⤴
4. Linking the pendulum clock so directly to the Industrial Revolution is a bit reductive, but if you want an even wilder hypothesis, I learned after writing the bulk of this that author Steven Johnson blames the printing press for our obsession with time. Apparently, heaps of people realised they were far-sighted, and their need of reading spectacles supported the development of lenses, which led to microscopes and telescopes. Arguably, the printing press not only introduced an astrological need for accurate timekeeping, it revolutionised our concept of everything from atoms up to the cosmos. ⤴

A few Sundays ago, I went for a ride with a friend starting from my Darlington sharehouse. The afternoon sun needled into our skin as we cycled through Redfern and along the foot of Mount Steel (the incongruous official name of the grassy rise between Cleveland Street and the Moore Park Golf Course). We cruised south after hitting Anzac Parade, enjoying progressively quieter roads as we neared La Perouse.

Mount Steel in its formative years as a rubbish tip, 1937

By contrast, the coastal outcrop where we ended up was a buzz of activity, crowded with dozens of families, kite-flying and an ice cream van. The crash of waves and murmur of voices was a familiar soundscape. I hadn’t grown up in Sydney, but I’d spent a lot of time by the sea. The main difference here was the container cranes across the bay.

Shortly into our return leg, we made a spontaneous turn into the unknown. We passed a sad-looking Botany Bay Hotel (est. 1865) and found ourselves in an utterly deserted scrap of parkland. Overgrown paths looped around spindly trees and sloping shadows; each blind bend held occult promise. There were probably bodies in the weeds. Like the hotel, the park been divorced from the water by shipping and transport infrastructure. The land had fallen into neglect because it was no longer suited to any recreation—apart from plane-watching.

Land reclamation for Port Botany in the 1970s (Botany Bay Hotel circled)

To exit the park, we had to haul our bikes over an elevated concrete platform that stretched out of sight in both directions: housing for a massive Caltex pipeline that begins at the Kurnell import terminal and runs underneath Botany Bay, pumping 400,000 litres of fuel per hour to the airport. On the other side of that cheerless marvel was a dead-end street—Booralee Street—strewn with broken-down vehicles and devoid of movement but for a retreating cat. Halfway up the pothole-filled road, we came across a pair of cottages surrounded by work-yards and opposite a container shipping yard. They reminded me of Chinese dingzihu.

One of the cottages was for sale. A sign read “Renovated Charmer In a Thriving Locale.” Why not? We entertained ourselves with the thought of throwing a party to lure friends into this unlikely location. Few neighbours to worry about the noise, that’s for sure. How much were we looking at? We looked it up later over dinner: a cool $840,000. At time of writing, it’s still on the market, despite being quite a bargain—the median 3-bedroom price for the suburb hovers over $1.3 million.

View from the front porch

We had stumbled into northwest Botany, surely one of Sydney’s most surreal pockets. A melange of industrial sites, quaint homes and large residential developments, bounded by the M1 and cut off from the old foreshore; it’s a world utterly unto itself, yet so close to the CBD and a swag of beaches. Surveying its ramshackle streets in golden half-light, we were smitten.

The renovated cottages are the physical remnants of the once-vibrant Booralee fishing town, which kicked off in the 1820s and thrived for about a century. John Smith was born there in 1952 and experienced the community’s final phase before it disappeared in the 1970s, when the last fishermen retired to Jervis Bay:

[I]ndustrialization swallowed the houses, paddocks and sand dunes, slicked the foreshores and then poisoned the water. By the time we left they were measuring the mercury content in the fish. Breakwaters built for the protection of shipping caused erosions and ruined spawning grounds for the large travelling schools of fish. Dredging for airport runways reshaped the shorelines and then came the reclamation of most of the north shoreline for the port.

Smith, whose family history traces back to the original colonists, also recognised that

the loss of the native Kameygal people to smallpox, displacement and their nation, compared to the relative comfort of the displacements of my generation, is haunting.

Even though I appreciate industrial sites on an historic, cultural and aesthetic level, reminders of human cost prevent me from fully enjoying the artistic exploration of such places—or at least inject additional pathos. I was recently struck by the notion of “sacrifice zones”: the forced sacrificing of lands and water—and the people who live and work there—to the destructive altar of fossil fuel extraction. This growth-fuelled sacrifice mentality perpetuates injustice, because the worst costs are often suffered by the people least equipped to deal with them. First the Kameygal clan lost their resources, then the fishermen.

I returned to La Perouse last Saturday. My friend met me at 10:30 pm and we drove there. We had all the usual components of a memorable evening: a spider-dodging bushwalk along Henry Head, laying under a ceiling of dry lightning, and in the wee hours, a tense face-off on an unlit road with a group of hoons set on shanking us with a jack handle. So marked my final night as a Sydneysider.